Confetti’s 2013 – A Retrospective

In the nearly five years of Confetti’s existence, this was by far the most exciting, most successful and most colorful year. This year we got the chance to work with many AAA teams and help them fulfill their vision of a great game.
At the beginning of the year we worked for AMD with Crystal Dynamics on Lara Croft’s hair in Tomb Raider. Later on we worked with the team at Industrial Toys on Midnight Star, then for AMD on the Ruby demo, doing optimizations and hair rendering. We did some special effects work for Avalanche NY by providing them with top-notch implementations of Screen-Space Reflections and Screen-Space Skin. For Intel we ported DOOM III BFG to OpenGL ES 3.0 and Ubuntu 13.10 to prepare it for Steambox usage. For Cloud Imperium / Star Citizen we worked on building a tool that can generate Nebulas. We invented a new volumetric looking particle effect for that. We added an explosion effect that is three dimensional, generating procedural geometry. Later in the year, we were working on CPU and GPU optimizations for Battlefield 4 for AMD. We were quite proud of the games benchmarks on AMD platforms. We also did consulting work for Bigpoint, Qualcomm, Insomniac and Horizon HPC.

Our middleware packages evolved quite a bit this year. We have now three different versions of Aura; our real-time global illumination system. One for open-world games, one for indoor environments and one for movie rendering. Aura is still the only real-time solution that doesn’t require pre-processed data and works on characters and with an unlimited number of lights. PixelPuzzle -our Post-Processing Pipeline- was the first postfx pipeline that runs completely in a non RGB color space. The Depth of Field effect, world-class in performance and aesthetic, stands unrivaled in the industry.

The quality of our skydome system’s cloud lighting was improved and at the same time the algorithm to generate atmospheric scattering was made more generic, so that there is a wider range of different looking skies that can be mimicked.
We have now optimized packages for PC, XBOX One and PS4.